


If a Rose Were a Promise

by StarshipCaptain



Series: Deep Space 9 Shorts [2]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Gardening as Therapy, Hopeful Ending, Language of Flowers, M/M, Pining, Post-Canon, Sad Gardening, its supposed to be romantic but im gay and cannot be forced to write more
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:14:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24344080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarshipCaptain/pseuds/StarshipCaptain
Summary: Garak has a planet to take care of, but even after everything, Julian still haunts him.
Relationships: Julian Bashir & Elim Garak
Series: Deep Space 9 Shorts [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1758310
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	If a Rose Were a Promise

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by a day in the greenhouse and a lot of slow meadow (with an updated title. previously Where Flowers Bloom)

The soil was gritty. He could feel the sand abrading his fingers as he picked through the dirt to gently coax out the shrivelled bulbs and dust away the sad shells they shed. The pot had been dry, completely neglected. 

“How long has it been since someone watered you?” Garak wondered aloud. The bulbs did not reply.

He sighed and rubbed his leg before getting back to work. There were far more bulbs in here than there was any right to be, but he kept at it. With any luck he would be able to carefully tend them back to their plump fullness and plant them somewhere more appropriate. Perhaps just behind the house; it was shaded during the afternoon and evening when the furious Cardassian sun was at its hottest and the bulbs could do with some care.

“Yes, I’ll plant you over there, shall I?” Garak asked the pathetic bulbs as he grasped the bottom corners of his apron and brushed the bulbs into the bowl it made. They rolled around, light as air. “Give you plenty of water, and some fertiliser maybe, if I can find some, and you’ll be strong again in no time.”

Looking over at the little patch of dirt behind the house, Garak frowned. It was full of vicious weeds and the soil was rocky. He had his work cut out for him. No matter, he decided, these little bulbs were worth it. 

“It’s a shame your previous owner isn’t here to take care of you anymore,” Garak confessed. “A lot has probably changed since you were planted. There’s been a whole war. I do wonder what variety you might be! Isn’t that exciting? I shall have to do my utmost to ensure you don’t die on me before we find out.”

He carefully scooped them into a saucer that sat just inside the door to his shed. He’d built it himself as soon as the materials had become available and over the past months since then had been stocking it with all sorts of tools. Garak missed the earth, he found. Years of suffering on that space station and, despite his little potted plants, nothing could touch him quite as deeply as feeling grass tickling his ankles as he knelt down to deadhead a bush bursting at the seams with pale pink roses. A gift. A terrible gift! They were horribly picky and it took all of Garak’s efforts to keep them thriving in this climate, but he would be damned if he would let them die. They were a promise.

“I don’t suppose you have any ideas?” Garak asked the roses. They shone up at him, the dead and dying flowers in his hand soft and sticky with decay. “Won’t this be exciting? Finding out the identity of your new neighbour?”

Some might say that Garak had lost his mind. Garak would rather say that he was preserving it. He was, for the most part, alone. He had been lucky enough to be assigned one of the remaining residences after the destruction of his world. It was under some pretense of him needing a proper place to stay while he helped rebuild, or something like that. He didn’t mind terribly. The house was tiny, barely big enough to have the bedroom separate, and was obviously a service class residence before. Well, it was a service class residence now, he supposed. Not to mention he had a garden again! A tiny, barely two metres squared area after he built his little shed in the corner, but a garden nonetheless. 

“Let’s get you watered,” Garak said with a small smile. He stroked one of the delicate petals of a particularly eager rose that was reaching above all the others, trying to kiss the sky. “It wouldn’t do for him to see any of you wilting after all this effort.”

It hardly took a minute to fill the watering can before Garak was gently watering the base of the bush. He could prepare the soil tomorrow for the new bulbs, give them a chance to plump up again from the water he drizzled into the saucer. He dearly hoped they weren’t too far gone. He’d dragged that pot over several blocks from the wreckage of a collapsed home once he found evidence of life. The rose bush was the only thing in the garden other than the walls and the shed and the patchy, sparse grass. He needed something else to care for lest he be driven to insanity.

“I wonder when this will stop hurting?” Garak mused. “It’s getting a bit old by now, caring for you like this while he isn’t even here to see.”

The roses shuddered in the barest breeze, a gentle perfume wafting into Garak’s face. It smelled good, light, airy, like home. He vividly remembered being given this plant, a tiny little thing, pathetic and terribly cared for. It was shoved in his hands with a stutter and he barely had time to register how poor the plant looked before he was alone again, blinking at the empty corridor ahead of him. Nonetheless, he had tended to it with as much deliberate care as he did his other plants, giving it pride of place on the dresser in his bedroom where he could keep an eye on it. 

“Ha!” Garak chuckled, brushing his hands down his already filthy apron. “To think of how utterly ridiculous he was even then. Everything was falling apart and I thought I’d lost everything that meant anything to me and here we are.” He felt foolish talking to the plant as he knelt before it, gazing into the curves of a flower and marvelling at the veins he could see running through the petals. He pulled out his secteurs and snipped some of the dead flowers that had been hiding from him before. “I won’t cry over it, don’t be so silly. Maybe he won’t ever see how magnificent you’ve become, hm? And wouldn’t that be a shame.”

Garak almost sighed, but such things were below him, or so he liked to believe. He had a city to rebuild, a culture to restore, a world to reshape. He didn’t have time for such things. He had to believe that. It had been- God, how long had it been? A year? Maybe more? And here he was, staring into the soul of a flower and  _ pining _ . He was better than this, he was better than this, he was better-

“Elim?” 

Garak whipped around. He’d been waiting for this moment that he never really believed would come, tending to his garden as attentively as he tended to the needs of Cardassia, and here stood Garak’s hope in all his lanky, awkward glory. A shining beacon of happiness on this ruined planet.

He couldn’t help himself as he stumbled to his feet and rushed across the small space with the urgency of a dying man, dead flowers tumbling to the floor.

“Julian!”

Because that’s what these roses meant.

Happiness.


End file.
